Cold War Puerto Rico - Steve Howell

A gripping history of FBI surveillance, political repression, and the fight for Puerto Rican independence In the 1940s, with the construction of a naval base and a bombing range, Puerto Rico became a major geo-political military outpost for the United States. For a power claiming global leadership in a decolonizing world, however, the archipelago’s colonial condition underscored the dissonance between American democratic rhetoric and its imperial reality. The solution was a deal that, in 1952, gave Puerto Rico a degree of self-government without changing its legal status as an “unincorporated” US territory. The US then publicly claimed Puerto Rico was now more autonomous while using repressive tactics such as FBI surveillance, arrests, destabilization, and other methods developed in Washington to silence activists and political parties pushing for full independence. In Cold War Puerto Rico, Steve Howell examines how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI targeted Puerto Rican communists as part of an offensive against pro-independence parties and activists generally. Howell’s US-born father, who fell afoul of Hoover for producing radical cartoons while working in San Juan in the 1940s, remained on the FBI’s watch list long after exiling himself in Britain. His close friends, the Puerto Rican author Cesar Andreu Iglesias and Jane Speed de Andreu, were meanwhile arrested and imprisoned three times during the 1950s. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, including interviews and
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